CPS - Week 3 - Found Objects

CONTEXT

Tasked with finding something strange or interesting, I recorded the voice in the Building 7 lift that announces the floor you're arriving on. A seemingly mundane thing, yet the way it pronounces the word "floor" is really out of step, and carries an almost sultry tone that betrays the human behind the machine.

Taking this as my starting point, I wanted to explore the layer of this object that gave it the sense of personality. The fact that it annunciates certain words with a more emotive tone gives it much more of a human feeling as it seems to be expressing intent, attempting to open a dialogue with the elevator riders.

Using this as the starting point I decided to do research around our human connections with machines, and the idea that they might be reaching out to us for human contact.

I came across this photographic series by Eiji Ohashi, 'Roadside Lights', that communicates the feeling of isolation through vending machines in remote locations around Japan.

https://www.sapporo-creation.com/existence

I also came across excerpts from a book that refer to "Enchanted Objects", a term coined by David Rose. "...machines should not look human or appear charming precisely so they will not activate human emotions, and thus the distinction between humans and machines will be preserved” and "the uneasy feeling provoked by machines that approach human likeness (the “uncanny valley”) betrays our fascination with the line between human and not-human"

METHOD

My method was to seek out public interactions between human and machine, where the machines purpose is to communicate in some form with the human, yet as humans we are programmed to reactively ignore, or view these messages as purely functional and without voice. My aim was to attempt to capture the 'loneliness' of these machines visually.

RESPONSE

From my explorations I found myself wanting to take the video I had captured and attach a more human voice to it, experiementing with how it's tone could potential evoke it's inherent loneliness. I found the scrolling announcement bar on the tram as the perfect machine on which to attempt this - entirely mechanical even in it's movement, yet vital and helpful to us everyday in such a friendly way.

I found some instructional videos on youtube about correct ways to communicate in english taught by an elderly lady. I tried to attach her voice clips to an animated version of the tram, but found it far to disconnected. Finding that I couldn't get the tone across with the voice, I decided to try communicating tone through visual language instead.